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Peter Orszag’s defense of public sector pay rates

I didn’t really care about Peter Orszag’s decision to step down from OMB, but Veronique de Rugy had a good post at the Corner about it. Namely, just this OMB blog post done by Orszag that she linked to. Money quote from Orszag:

Especially in these difficult economic times, everyone is understandably concerned about the performance and salaries of our federal workers (which is one reason why the President is freezing salaries and bonuses for all political appointees). And if, as some media reports claim, federal workers were earning roughly $8,000 more than private-sector workers in occupations that exist both in the government and private sector for no reason at all, that would be troubling. But the truth is that a comparison of federal and private-sector pay, even by occupation, is misleading because the employees hired by the federal government often have higher levels of education than their counterparts in the private sector – even within the same occupations.

That’s such a stupid, overly simplistic thing to say. Are all degrees created equal? Just because a federal employee has a degree from University of Phoenix makes him better than another worker without a useless piece of paper from a degree mill? Furthermore, does that include the college degrees obtained on the job by federal employees that we the taxpayers helped pay for? I could tell Peter Orszag some great stories from my seasonal gig at the IRS about my boss and her stories of barely passing freshman writing courses at a local community college; barely passing them, of course, because the federal government doesn’t pay if you fail.